Civilization and its Enemies: The Next Stage of History
By Lee Harris
Free Press
HC, 232 pg. US$/C$
ISBN: 0-7432-5749-9
The war for our survival
By Steven Martinovich
web posted February 9, 2004
Man's greatest failing may be that we forget the lessons of the
past. Lee Harris argues that the terrorist attacks of September
11, 2001 proved that contention handily. After the attacks
liberals rushed to blame the West for its foreign policy sins while
conservatives saw it as a war between clashing cultures. The
reality, according to Harris, is that the attacks represented an
age-old battle between what he terms civilization and its enemies.
Born of a series of controversial essays in Policy Review and
TechCentralStation, Civilization and its Enemies: The Next Stage
of History explores Harris' thesis. Our enemy isn't Islam, though
the foot soldiers in this battle are radical Muslims, but rather a
foe that civilization has been grappling with since the days of
Sparta. Disturbingly, it is a fight that a majority in the Western
world aren't equipped to fight.
Although the American-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq would
suggest otherwise, Harris argues that it is we in the West who
are often intellectually unable to grasp the concept of "enemy"
and why they seek our destruction. Led by our utopian
intellectuals, we fail to realize that we have enemies who see the
world differently than we do, and in that world we are nothing
more than their enemies, "not for our faults any more than for
virtues."
"We are caught in the midst of a conflict between those for
whom the category of enemy is essential to their way of
organizing all human experience and those have banished even
the idea of the enemy from both public discourse and even their
innermost thoughts."
The reason why we have become their enemies is due to what
Harris refers to as "fantasy ideology." Like Benito Mussolini's
Italian fascism and Adolph Hitler's National Socialism before it,
radical Islam has created an ideology that is disconnected from
reality. It is a style of ideology that is deliberate make-believe,
one that does not explain the world the way it really is but rather
how it wishes the world would be. "[T]he make-believe is not an
end in itself but rather the means of making the make-believe
become real." In fantasy ideologies, the other players --
unbelievers -- become props in the fantasist's world and attacks
like September 11, 2001 are symbolic dramas designed for the
fantasists' audience, a ritual demonstration designed to show
Allah's power to al-Qaida's believers.
From there Harris explores the nature of civilization and the long,
slow process it took to evolve from the early team approach
pioneered by the Spartans, the hierarchical system that was
added by the Romans to the complex system we enjoy today.
Civilization's strength, he points out, is also its weakness. We are
a civilization that is the equivalent of a small town so trusting that
we leave our doors unlocked because we know we can trust our
neighbors. When a thief comes around our trusting nature is
turned against us, permanently changing who we are.
What we have forgotten is that the enemy is ruthless and our civil
ways are no defense. The only way to defend yourself against a
ruthless enemy is to become ruthless yourself. As Harris points
out, if someone is willing to die to kill you then you must be
willing to die to defend yourself. Failing to do so means that your
civilization is vanquished. The trick is to unleash that ruthlessness
without becoming permanently ruthless yourself and destroying
what makes civilization worth fighting for.
Although it's tempting to dismiss all of this as interesting talk for
intellectuals, the issues raised by Civilization and Its Enemies are
the very ones that we are facing today. That the fantasy ideology
of radical Islam is a clear and present danger to the West is of no
question: the war declared by Osama bin Laden in the 1990s is a
fight to the death. Since September 11, 2001 we have faced
several critical questions: Why are we so vulnerable to an enemy
equipped with a ruthless urge to destroy us? How do we defend
ourselves? How do we fight without losing the essence of what
believe makes us who we are? Why do we keep forgetting the
enemies of civilization never permanently go away?
Civilization and Its Enemies is amongst the most important books
written since the terrorist attacks. It is a wake up call to an entire
civilization, a declaration that our traditional view of the world
needs to be updated for a new dangerous age and an old enemy.
It's doubtless that some will quibble with several of Harris'
conclusions -- notably that the United States is the only force
powerful enough to push back the enemy -- but the stunning
clarity of his argument is all but beyond debate. This is a book
that needs to be read by both sides of the political divide if the
West is to understand who is really fighting and why nothing less
than total victory can suffice.
Steven Martinovich is a freelance writer in Sudbury, Ontario,
Canada.
Enter Stage Right -- http://www.enterstageright.com